The topic of Plato’s Theatetus is ‘what is knowledge.’ Throughout the dialogue the idea that knowledge is perception is repeatedly mentioned. The definition of knowledge equaling perception has a few unintended outcomes that Socrates tries to work through. One of those outcomes is that no individual can have a false perception. This creates multiple problems including what is ‘true’ when two people disagree about what they are perceiving; and how someone can change their mind about a perception. In other words, how can a person realize that they were mistaken about what they originally thought they saw?
I think the way to reconcile no false perception and people disagreeing is to look into the difference between the language that people use and what they actually mean. An example of this is: two people are standing in a room and one says that the room is cold and the other says that the room is hot. Now it seems as though this means that if no one can be wrong about their perceptions then the room is both hot and cold at the same time. But what this actually means is that person A feels the 70*F temperature of the room and finds that it feels cold to them, not that it is actually cold, and person B feels the same temperature and just responds differently to that temperature. This leads to both people having an accurate perception of the same thing and being able to disagree about which has the ‘true’ answer.
A person can change their mind about a perception and still not have had a false perception the first time if they go through the following process. The person first looks at a wall. After looking at the wall they state that the wall is red, at the time this perception is true. They then picture a red apple, or hold a red apple up to the wall, and realize that the wall is actually orange. What this really means is that the individual saw an orange wall and mistakenly said that it was a red wall, but they had the correct perception of an orange wall all along they simply mislabeled the color.
OK...so I think this all still leaves open the problem of Heraclitus vs. Parmenides. If the world is fundamentally the same for everybody, regardless of how we perceive it, then we're still left to wonder how we establish the world's sameness. What's the discursive element that allows us to say the world maintains its sameness despite everyone's perceptions differing? Perception would suggest that the world is always changing and different for everyone - so how do we escape this dilemma?
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